With something approaching 200 images in the Parker/Carboni portfolio I am often asked – “what are your top 5 favourite images?” Well, after quite a bit of thought on this one, and for reasons that go beyond the impact of the image itself in some cases – this is what I come up with.
What are your top 5 favourites?
Yesterday the New Forest Observatory web site reached a truly massive 80,000 hits! It is interesting to note the most popular landing page from peoples’ searches. Have you any idea what it might be? Could it be “images of deep-space”, Star Vistas, or perhaps nebulae/galaxies/stars?
No – in fact it is my short article on “How a Mirror Works”!! So there you go 🙂
We have recently seen a big kick in sales of Star Vistas in America which seems to be due to the appearance of a mini-review in the July issue of Sky and Telescope written by Sean Walker 🙂 Thank you Sean – all publicity for Star Vistas is gratefully received!!
As per usual – I do not image during June as not only are the nights too short, but also it never really gets dark enough to be able to take good quality images. However, having said that, I might just break my rule this year as we have had such a terrible start to the year weather-wise.
June is a month to thoroughly vacuum out the obsevatory and dust everything down. Make sure all your backup batteries are fully charged and your telescope optics are nice and clean. If you have a permanent observatory computer, bring it indoors (unless you have an outdoor Internet link) and get all the software and security updates loaded up. Also (lightly) vacuum the air inlets of the computer if they appear dusty. Does the observatory sealing round the base need attention, and do the dome rotation or sliding roof wheels need oiling and cleaning?? Does your fibreglass dome need a good car wash to remove the fine green film of algae, or does your shed-observatory need a fresh coat of preservative.
Now is the month to get all those niggling jobs done that you consistently put off for the other 11 months. I won’t wish you clear skies as that will simply add to the frustration of this month – instead I wish you happy cleaning and upgrading.
The satellite van is in sunny Brockenhurst right now and there’ll be a live broadcast from the New Forest Observatory tonight on the local Meridian News. We’re due to have a few days (and nights!) fine weather apparently, so I guess we’ll all be bleary eyed for work again on Monday 🙁 Watch this space for more on tonight’s programme.
Well that went a lot smoother than I was expecting, these Meridian guys are very professional and make the whole thing appear very relaxed and easy (which it isn’t). Even Louey (our black Labrador) made a cameo appearance on the night 🙂
Noel continues to turn them out 🙂 This time he has collated all of our previous data and skilfully combined the lot to give this wide field panorama of the M78 region in Orion. Noel has combined original Hyperstar RGB data of M78 together with Sky 90 RGB and H-alpha data to bring out not only the beauty of M78 itself, and the surrounding dark nebulosity, but also the very faint Barnard’s Loop off to the left.
Noel has just completed the digital image processing of this one taken on Friday 23rd January 2009 from the New Forest Observatory. This is the nice open cluster M38 in Auriga with close-by smaller open cluster NGC1907. Some red emission nebulosity, LBN794 can be seen to the right of the image. The reason I haven’t centralised M38 is that this is one of four frames I want to stitch together of this area. I have three of the frames and hope to get the fourth frame later this year to complete the mosaic.
This image of M106 was acquired on Wednesday 1st April and Noel has recently processed it. I love the Mother-of-Pearl appearance of M106, it makes it one of my favourite galaxies. This region of Canes Venatici (lying below the handle of the Plough or Big Dipper) is crammed full of galaxies – how many can you see in this image? A quick scan shows at least 18 other galaxies, a bit harder looking I’m sure will pull out a few more 🙂
Radio interview recorded in April 2009
A new local radio (webcast) station recently opened in Brockenhurst and Greg was invited along to talk about the New Forest Observatory. You can listen to the interview here 🙂
[media id=5 width=320 height=240]
For regular visitors it will not have escaped your notice that there haven’t been many new images posted so far this year. This is due to two factors. One – Noel has been very busy with other programming jobs and has barely come up to surface in the last 6 months. Two – I have had very poor weather conditions since the beginning of the year and have only managed to capture about 5 or 6 new images so far in 2009 🙁 However, Noel needed a break from the day job and processed a single framer of the Cone Nebula taken last Winter using the Hyperstar III kit. I had intended that this would be a 6-framer with the whole of the Cone Nebula plus a couple of nearby lying reflection nebulae. But of course the weather had other ideas and what was to be my Winter mega-project just turned out to be a single frame of less than 4 hours. Likewise I had hoped this Spring to get four more frames lying off the bottom of the Markarian chain to complete a mega-mosaic of the region. Result so far – nothing – nada – zilch – zero. I guess I should not really bother trying to plan projects – the weather is always guaranteed to let me down. Enough moaning – here’s the Cone Nebula.
